‘What The Hell Was I Thinking?!!’ - Confessions of the World’s Most Controversial Sex Symbol (5 page)

On top of that, aside from my dancing earnings, we never had any money, which was hard to believe because we’d make an average of $3000.00 from a given antique show and on a bad day, at least $1000.00. Of course, he never gave me any of it, so on my own, at one point, I started collecting vintage Barbies from the 1950s through the 1970s, which was a lot of fun. I bought most of that collection with dancing money, and honestly, they were better company at that point than Dick was, because every night he’d go out with his friends drinking and leave me at home alone. I felt like he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. In the meanwhile, Tommy was doing everything he could to get me to leave Dick for him. He was a very sweet and sensitive guy for being such a bad ass, and would pick me up every night after work to make sure I got home safely. He was always begging me to move in with him so he could take care of me. I couldn‘t cut loose of Dick for one simple reason that only another battered woman reading this would understand. The fear that is beaten into you as a victim of domestic violence is what leaves the most permanent mark — not the bruises.

By that point, Dick’s physical abuse had deteriorated slowly but surely from his yelling at me to just hitting me when he felt I hadn’t done something right. Every day, he’d come home, go out to the strip clubs with his friends, or sneak out of the house when he was home to make calls to girls from payphones. And of course, whenever I attempted to call him on it, he’d smack me or slam my head into something. I still have a mark on the back of my head from one time when he slammed me into a closet door. At that point, in addition to being scared to leave him, didn’t understand why he was doing this to me, and on some sad level a lot of women reach, I felt it was my fault in some way what he was doing to me. I just wanted to have a normal relationship with my boyfriend — wanted to be loved by someone outside of my family. Even though I did all the right things, it never worked. So as the months rolled on, our dysfunctional routine continued with Dick going to strip clubs every night with his friends, hitting me whenever I made noise about it and making me feel so shitty about myself that I kept dancing to cling to any basic sense of self-esteem. The Kit Kat Club had become Flash Dancers by this point, and they had started doing features, which sounded interesting to me, and honestly, I was in need of the money going broke between paying for his student loans and my one, which I’d taken over from my mom.

After a while of this vicious down cycle, I guess Dick slammed me hard enough in the head to finally see clearly that if I didn’t leave him, he might honestly have killed me.

It’s sad that I had to feel my life was in danger before I was willing to try and change it, but I finally did, moving out of his apartment and back in with my mom, and he moved back in with his own. I still to this day don’t know where it was okay for me to tolerate that kind of treatment by him because no one in my family did that. He was very controlling, sort of like my mom, and never paid any attention to me, and I guess the fact that he really used to beat the shit out of me was so surreal I didn‘t accept it as reality until I‘d left him. Being home was at least a relief from that to some degree but then I had my mom on my ass. On top of it, Dick had taken my entire Casper the Ghost collection and anything else he could steal of mine and moved it all back into his mother’s. I was afraid of ghosts growing up. It may sound stupid to some of you, but collecting Casper memorabilia — which included board games, bobbing heads, wooden pull toy from the 1940s, hand puppets, the talking dolls, comic books, puzzles, costumes, and all types of odd items — helped me overcome my fear of ghosts. It was an odd form of therapy, but also the only escape and thing I’d had for myself while I’d been under Dick’s vicious thumb.

Thankfully, I got my Barbie collection out, but he just kept driving me deeper and deeper into debt in one form or another. So I started doing this Robin Byrd show in New York, and dancing at Flash Dancers because I really enjoyed the attention a lot. I don’t know to date if my mom ever knew explicitly what I was doing in terms of dancing, but I do remember once she threw out one of my $500 costume gowns, which I had to replace while saying nothing about it. Don’t ask me why, but after a few weeks, I started seeing Dick and trying to make that work thinking the distance might have helped. I remember he called me one night and said he’d been mugged and beaten up, which I still to this day think Tommy was behind, so I broke things off with him as a result. Tommy was very sweet to me, but I think that scared me a little, knowing Tommy would have been capable of that with Dick. Anyway, it was very sad. Tommy was in tears when we broke up. It was upsetting for me because he made my life happy at that time, but I guess I thought I had more invested with Dick, and needed to see that out to what turned out to be its bitter end. Tommy was the perfect guy for me at that time and I will always cherish the time we had.

After breaking things off with Tommy, I kept working at Flash Dancers, and was looking into feature dancing at this point. So I would hide my gowns from my mom, and my schedule during the week usually involved working a 12-8 shift after I got out of Germany or Philosophy class at Columbia, or I would work one night shift which ran 4-12, or 8-4 in the morning. I would do a couple of those. For the day shifts, I would usually tell my mom I was studying and I brought home the grades to prove it. For the night shifts, I told her I was out with friends. During the weekend, she was usually gone to North Carolina, where she had a store, so that was easier. It was exciting to me to have such radically contrasting worlds to co-exist within. It honestly was the foundation of my acting career I think, because I had to play two entirely different characters, and the only time I got off from keeping both worlds running full-time was when I slept. Still, I never changed who I was as a person in either, just learned how to let people see what they wanted to see. That was a survival instinct of mine by that point, and one that would serve me greatly in my future career.

When I wasn’t working during the weekends, Dick and made slow progress toward a reconciliation. We would take trips to Pennsylvania to do the conventions, and at one, sadly, a toy dealer had allegedly seen me dancing at the club, and that finally got back to Dick. Well, as you can imagine, he didn’t take it very well. When I tried to be honest with him about it, explaining it was to help make ends meet, and to feel better about myself, things went right back down the toilet with his reply that I was ‘a fucking whore.’ Of course, he concluded his reaction by punching me in my mouth, in front of his friends, who were all laughing. After that, I was that much more motivated to keep dancing — and OPENLY — just to spite him, not to mention the money I was making. I would pull down $350 to $400 on a bad day and anywhere from $500 to $800 on a good night although I never did lap dances or anything like that. This was strictly from the stage. After a while, Dick even started to begrudgingly shut the fuck up about my dance gig because I was struggling to keep both of us in school, paying his and my loans. I guess I still felt Dick loved me somewhere in my own twisted view of things.

My one protective mechanism against Dick’s temper was that, following our split, I was living at home. On the weekends, Dick and I would go away to do these conventions in Pennsylvania or Chicago, and he’d make me sleep in the van in the freezing cold. When he did wake me up, it was at 3 in the morning to go set up, while he’d either go back to sleep, or go off and smoke a joint and walk around with his friends while I did all our set-up work. Ironically enough, for as much as my mother liked Dick, the whole time we attended these conventions together she would tell me ‘You’re way too elegant and classy to be doing that with them, traveling around like this.’ During this period, Dick tried a couple times to bust me at work too, and fortunately, both times he walked in, I ducked and was able to avoid him because he never knew my exact shifts. Before too long, he was back to his old self, and he’d managed to hook me back in just enough to keep me around. By this point too, when he wasn’t beating me or bossing me around, or forcing me under the threat of physical violence to pay his school loans, he spent the rest of what would have been any other normal couple’s free time together out cheating on me. When he wasn’t cheating on me, he would routinely check out other women in front of me and put me down physically on context of their looks. It got so sewer-like at one point that he came home with some kind of bacteria infection he passed to me, so I was sick from that for a week. Thankfully, it got cleared up, but that fucking infection had more class than he did.

After a while, I cut down my days dancing, and stopped altogether for a while. I was nearing graduation from Columbia at this point, which meant I could start working more regularly. Before graduation, I landed a job working as an investment counselor in the financial district in downtown Manhattan. I did financial consulting for investments. At that point, Dick enrolled full-time in community college, and also expected me to be his in-house tutor, which basically meant doing his homework for him. I remember one day I was trying to help him with his French class, and he wasn’t getting it, so he slammed the book, threw at me, and screamed, ‘You stupid cunt, you can’t even help me with this!’ So things kept deteriorating from there, he slowly but surely stopped having sex with me, and was going away more with his buddies and leaving me in the city, so I started finally to lose a little interest. Around this same period, my dad died of lung cancer, I was 20 years old. I had no one to support me through it, because my mother was bitching about everything and my boyfriend went out to a strip club and then to some Korean whore house with his friends the night my dad passed away. It was April 14th to be exact, and probably the worst night of my life, and in general, arguably the most difficult experience of my life. For a brief period, I signed over every single legal right I had in the world to my mother because I was emotionally very unstable for a period. It was very fucked-up how things went down, because my dad had quit smoking for 10 years and he ended up dying of lung cancer anyway. His family were such assholes through the whole thing too that I had to go to probate court at one point and I just hope they all die in hell, and don’t care if they read this too. It’s sick that while my father was slowly but surely dying on a respirator, none of his family showed up until he was on the verge of death. It turned out that he had a will that had been revised enough times that his Estate, which was left almost entirely to me, was suddenly being challenged left and right. His whole family tried to drag me through court, and the stress finally took such a toll that I signed power of attorney over to my mother to deal with it.

I was trying to deal with my father’s death, finish school, deal with Dick, and just trying to have a life in general, so I was in no shape to deal with fucking Probate Court! When she convinced me to sign over Power of Attorney, I was almost relieved, but it put me more in the dark. To date, I don’t have any idea what happened with the money. I found out at one point later that summer that I had some loans in my name that had been defaulted on that I had never even taken out, which means my mother had to have set them up having power of attorney. When I called to inquire about it, she called me a ‘loose whore’ for going on the road to do some toy shows. When I did get back later on that summer and brought it up again with her, she got this extremely strange look on her face that was the equivalent of a bitter piercing glare. I suspected she was trying to fuck up my credit so that I couldn’t move out again. On top of that, when my mother took a break from trying to manipulate and control me, Dick picked right up where she left off: convincing me in my vulnerable state to withdraw $10,000 of the money my father had left me to invest in the toy business. Like an idiot, or maybe more like a confused, emotionally drained and vulnerable 20 year old student at an ivy league University who’d just lost her father, I stupidly agreed. Of course, I never saw any of that cash again. Giving money my father had left me away wasn’t like losing another part of him, but it did feel like another of the last shreds of dignity I had left had been stripped away by that asshole. I had people coming at me from every side trying to manipulate me. My sociopathic boyfriend, a controlling and paranoid mother who refused to let me grow into a young woman even after I was legally already one, and a bunch of Chicken Hawks who I’d once considered relatives trying to steal my father’s money from the Estate.

Before my dad passed, I was lucky to have had a few years to get reacquainted with him. We’d been out of touch some years prior when my mom moved us back to New York, but my dad relocated back from the Virgin Islands when I was a teenager, and we’d gotten reacquainted again very quickly and naturally. I remember one day calling his office and telling his secretary it was his daughter Jasmin calling, and he picked up the phone right away, and it had sounded like whatever call he’d been on prior was fairly important. Anyway, it didn’t matter, whatever it was, it could wait when I called. I remember him telling me that day that I’d made him ‘the happiest man in the world.’ I remember those words exactly coming out of his mouth and that’s how he always made me feel. He was very happy to hear from me and we’d started seeing each other again. At first I didn’t tell my mother I was seeing him again, and then when I finally did, she threw a fucking fit as expected. My grandmother got really angry with her at that, and it was one of the times I really remember her speaking up to my mom on my behalf, like, ‘Why are you yelling at her? It’s her father. She needs him. Get over it.’That calmed her down a little bit, but she’d still make fucking sour faces and remarks whenever I said I was going to see my dad. We had this routine where we’d meet for pizza after school and go to the movies. I’d go see him on weekends, and we did all kinds of fun stuff- from going hiking in the Pocono Mountains to horseback riding. I had my own horse named Chief my dad bought for me at Cloverleaf Stables on Staten Island, and every Saturday I’d go to ride him. My dad also taught me how to drive before I was even old enough legally to have a permit. We would do crazy shit like go to the mall together, and we would make these barking sounds sometimes to fuck with people and they wouldn’t know where it was coming from. To a little kid, and even thinking back on it now, it was so funny. He was so laid-back and so cool. He had a really good sense of humor. He was on the immature side, but like, when it was right to be immature. He always supported me in what I did, which was really important to me. We had a great relationship in that aspect. I think my fondest memory I have of my dad is when there was a tropical storm. I was there for tropical storm Fredrick and Hurricane Emily, like all of those. I was in St. Croix at that time. I was little girl, and I think my fondest memory is sitting there on the balcony of our house when my dad was smoking a cigarette and he just held me there. And it was like the most amazing thing, the storm. You know all the winds and everything, the gusts; all the leaves blowing all over the place. It was so scary, but it was so cool because I was just watching it there with my dad. I just felt so safe.